Description
After an escalated border dispute with India, the People’s Republic of China waged the Sino-Indian Border War and gained a clear positional advantage. Contrary to feminist consensus on states performing masculinity in wars, China curiously made a unilateral retreat and exhibited the feminine qualities of forbearance, pacifism, and nurturing towards India, avoiding venturing on its military success for maximized territorial gains. This paper argues that performing femininity towards India was not only part of China’s legitimation strategy for its use of violence but shall be understood as a strategic and intentionally moralized attempt to revise the PRC’s positionality within the global racial hierarchy. PRC’s deliberately orchestrated femininity during the Sino-Indian Border War was informed by Confucian war ethics, enabled by Beijing’s foreign policy radicalization and desire for leadership in the global Cold War. This paper demonstrates Confucian war ethics around three elements, i.e., opposing aggressive conquest, supporting punitive expeditions, and minimizing loss of life in the process, and that PRC's feminine performativity aligned closely with these elements. The article sheds light on the intersection of race and gender in understanding the postcolonial war dynamics, provincializing Eurocentric feminist perspectives on states’ wartime performativity whereby foregrounding the agency of postcolonial states.
